Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Rocket Science Games

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Release Date:

1995 (Sega CD 1994)

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Systems:

DOS, Sega Mega CD

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm checking out Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine, by the infamous Rocket Science Games.

Rocket Science was founded in 1993 with the goal to bring together some of the most talented people in the fields of video games and films to make some video games that are also films. With actors and everything. They were all-in on the idea of making FMV-based games and they thought that theirs could be the most visually impressive on the market. Not just because of the content, but because of the codec; their compression was among the best in the business, meaning more production value survived the process.

People took notice of how many high-profile designers and engineers were being hired, and investors began lining up to throw money at them. Interactive movies were sure to be the next big thing and Rocket Science had the talent and the funding to bring digital entertainment to the next level. But then all six of their games bombed, leading to them going out of business after just four years. And I mean really bombed, not just 'failed to meet sales expectations'. Loadstar released around the same time as their second game, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm, and it seems like by 1996 the two games still hadn't reached 8000 copies. With their sales combined. On all systems.

How is even possible that they made a dinosaur game in 1994 and failed to get anyone to buy it? That was the peak of Jurassic Park hype! Even Trespasser shifted 50,000 copies and that was straight-up broken!

Anyway, I'm playing the spaceship game, not the dinosaur game, and I'm curious now about why it didn't appeal to people at the time. Is it really that bad or were people just not into FMV? Am I going to be into the FMV? Will I be able to endure the amount of cheese I'm about to be exposed to?

WARNING: There will be a surprisingly graphic death sequence at some point. Also, I'm going to spoil the game's entire story.

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The game begins with a shot of space station in low Earth orbit, which is the kind of thing I approve of. It's May 9, 2103, so we've got just 79 years left to get that thing built.

Suddenly there's a massive explosion in the distance and a news report comes on to explain that it occurred at a research base on Charon, Pluto's largest moon. Which has nothing to do a space station in with low Earth orbit, at all.

Usually when a story puts text on screen establishing a location, we get to see a character or an event at that location. You'd expect it to cut inside to show some guy in a monitoring station picking up the space phone, or maybe we'd see the explosion damage the station. But no, this is all irrelevant, except for establishing Earth's level of technology.

The intro then cuts to the far side of the moon, where we get to meet the game's hero, who's currently trying to land a ship without fuel.

It's Barry Primus as the legendary "Tully Bodine"! The actor's a little less legendary, I hadn't heard of him anyway, but IMDb says that he's been in practically everything at some point, so I expect he'll do a decent enough job in the role. Especially by 1994 interactive movie standards.

Tully seems to be the only person on the ship but he's not entirely alone as he's got the onboard computer, Mortimer, to keep him company.

Mort has an emoji for a face, and that emoji is 😐. I feel like the poor guy has to put up with a lot.

The voice actor's IMDb page isn't all that extensive, though it does mention that he's video game designer Brian Moriarty! He's the guy who made the classic adventure game Loom and he was also responsible for Loadstar's "interactive design". So it's less than 2 minutes in and they've already resorted to bringing in the game devs to do voices!

To be fair, he actually does fine in the role. I wouldn't have guessed he wasn't an actor.

There she is, the eponymous Loadstar. A 500-foot Nova UD2 space freighter customised by Tully himself to be the fastest privately-owned ship in the solar system (I may have glanced at the manual a little).

In real life, the ship was created by Star Wars and Alien concept artist Ron Cobb, and I don't just mean the design as he was the game's writer too. In fact, Loadstar was based on an idea he had in mind since the '70s, so it's cool that he finally got to see his space truck realised.

They used a combination of techniques for these scenes, so the background here could be pre-rendered 3D, or a physical model, or even a matte painting, I don't have a clue. But the Loadstar itself is some of the best looking CGI I've seen from 1994, especially in a game. Sure the low resolution and compression artefacts cover up a lot of the flaws, but that's true for everything else from the time as well.

Tully heads to a space bar in Mendaleev City, where everyone knows his name. He hasn't shown his face here in three years, but everyone's happy to see him. He even gets a kiss! I guess he's already a fairly legendary guy.

This scene is reminding me a bit of the Wing Commander games, as they were also fond of cinematic sequences featuring space pilots in bars.

Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (MS-DOS)

Loadstar came out around the same time as Wing Commander III, and honestly I think it looks pretty good by comparison. WC3 makes heavy use of green screens, and a bunch of tables and chairs is as close as it comes to having an actual set, but the Loadstar cockpit and the bar are clearly real locations constructed on a sound stage. Look at the left side of the picture, see how Mark Hamill's hair has been cut off? That doesn't happen when you actually film it for real. Not without a lot of blood and mess anyway.

Anyway, so far Loadstar's making a decent first impression with arguably better production values than a highlight of the genre. Better writing though? Eh, maybe not.

Tully and friends start talking about the explosion on Charon and it seems like that plot might go somewhere, but they're interrupted by the shady guy with the suspect accent at the end of the bar who gives him his card. Seems like Tully's found work.

That's Tony Cox on the right, playing 'Bartender #1'. He's been in some stuff, lots of comedies. 'Bartender #2' was played by Michael J. Anderson, who was also busy around this time, appearing in Twin Peaks, Deep Space Nine and The X-Files.

Just then Sheriff Francis Wompler comes in and ruins the mood. This is Ned Beatty, whose IMDb page is the clear winner so far with 165 acting credits! That's not record-breaking, but it's a lot. It's 161 credits more than his son, Jon Beatty, who's currently standing behind him in the red cardigan playing Wompler's nephew Vern.

Tully hits him with the killer line "I see all that graft and corruption has gone to your gut," and the bar erupts with laughter.

Stretched to correct aspect ratio

Come on guys, I know you want to back your friend up and you all hate the sheriff, but it wasn't actually funny and when you laugh at the bad jokes it makes the script itself seem bad.

What you've been looking at so far is the DOS version of the game, which came out in 1995 and had three CDs for its video. But the game was originally released a year earlier on the Sega CD, where it came packed into one tiny CD and looked like this:

Sega CD - Stretched to correct aspect ratio

They really had to mangle the footage to get it to fit within the Genesis' colour limit and it's squished like a SNES game, so it's lost a bit of horizontal resolution. But I can definitely tell what I'm looking at here. Any issues with picture quality here come from the decision to strap a CD drive to a Genesis in the first place, not from the game.

Sewer Shark (Sega CD) - Stretched to correct aspect ratio

Here's a shot from Sewer Shark, which was apparently the first home console game to feature FMV for its primary gameplay. This is the game everyone compares Loadstar to and it's got a tiny little window! Sega CD Loadstar features 2.857 times as many pixels of video as this. Which is good, because it's also got a lot more actors on screen.

It turns out that Wompler and Tully had a falling out years ago over a woman, Molly Matlock, and now Tully's ready to give up space trucking and start a hotel business with her. He just needs to do one more job.

Things are still fairly civil between everyone, but then Vern gets just a little a bit too close to Tully, who doesn't appreciate his hostile aura. So he punches him in the stomach and then follows it up with another punch to the jaw!

So yeah, he just beat up the sheriff's nephew right in front of the sheriff, who already hated him, and the consequences are immediate. Wompler was going to give Tully eight hours to pay his landing fine and get out of Mendaleev, but now he's reduced that to two.

Tully needs a job fast, and he remembers that card the guy at the bar gave him, which says "Meet me at Bay 2844". We even get a proper insert shot with a close up of him holding the card, so they're just showing off their filming budget now. It's just like a real movie!

Tully arrives in a brand new set for his meeting and finds there's no cargo waiting at Bay 2844. It turns out he'll have to pick it up from Bay 247-West instead and he'll need to hurry as he's got just minutes to get there.

Mort checks the manifest and learns that the incredibly shady cargo they're picking up is...

Camels! 20 live camels. They're apparently very useful on Mars, which is where they'll be taking them. Well, Phobos, one of Mars' moons. Close enough.

And that's the end of the 8-minute-long intro cutscene. That's pretty lengthy for 1994. It's also entirely skippable, which I really appreciate.

Now the game's giving me a bit of a tutorial, explaining how to play. Which is good, because by the look of that HUD I'm going to need it. Is all that information really necessary?

The game has informed me that I use the left and right arrow keys to choose a route, the up arrow key to activate the shield and the right mouse button to honk the horn. Wait, my spaceship has a horn? They're really taking the space trucker thing a bit far here. The left mouse button is used for shooting, which is I guess is also something that space truckers do.

Okay, I'm entering the maglev trackway. Time for the voyages of the USS Loadstar.

Uh, why am I not in space? Or at least in the air. I get that maglev trains are fast, but surely air travel is faster... especially when you're on the Moon and there's no air.

I'm supposed to be heading to the observatory in the distance and the game's helpfully given me a red arrow compass to tell me where it is. Whenever the track splits like this I need to remember to follow the arrow. The rest of the time the ship flies down the trackway by itself, almost like the background is a pre-rendered video clip with a HUD superimposed over it. In fact it even spills out onto the black border.

The gameplay's suddenly gotten a bit more hands on, as little drones are swooping around and harassing me for the crime of "speeding". I don't think the police appreciates that I've got a deadline, so I need to discourage their aggression by blowing them to pieces with plasma balls.

Hang on, Mortimer's appeared on screen to tell me someth... oh shit I didn't see that other space truck ahead! I was supposed to honk the horn and make it speed up, but I didn't press the key in time and collided with the ass-end. Fortunately I just bumped it a bit and took a little hull damage, so I can get right back to speeding.

A head-on collision would've been a little more nasty, but I doubt these tracks are designed to let trucks drive the wrong way.

BLOODY HELL!

I should've known this would be one of those video-based games like Dragon's Lair and Kingdom: The Far Reaches where most of the effort and passion went into the death animations. This is exactly what it looks like in game by the way, I don't think I lost any quality by converting it to a GIF.

All the sections of track look the same in this place, but I'm pretty sure the game just put me back to the very start after that. So now I need to remember where I messed up and react faster next time.

The combat is getting more frantic, with more enemies on screen, but it's not been too difficult so far. It's the surprise instant-death collisions that have been ruining my run.

I feel like I should say something about the shooting, but it's pretty basic. Enemies fly onto the screen and start firing sparkly balls at me. I put the crosshair over them and keep clicking the button until they're gone. That's it. Autofire would've been nice.

Sega CD

Here's what the original Sega CD game looks like during gameplay.

If you're wondering why I'm not shooting the enemies, I am. You can't see your own shots in the original console version, that was a feature added for the PC version.

Otherwise the game looks very similar and plays pretty much the same, except you turn onto different tracks at junctions by pointing the crosshair over there. The crosshair that you're also using to shoot enemies. You can imagine how that gets awkward, especially as moving a cursor with a d-pad isn't ideal at the best of times. Plus the easy-to-read compass arrow was also added for the PC game, so all you've got here is the bearing number.

Sewer Shark (Sega CD)

Here's Sewer Shark for comparison. The cockpit fills most of the screen so you're viewing the action through a tiny window, but it still looks pretty great for what it is I reckon.

The games are extremely similar, as they both have the player flying down a tunnel, shooting things and choosing routes. Though Sewer Shark's first level is a lot less frantic and stressful.

Star Wars: Rebel Assault (Sega CD)

FMV-based rail shooters were definitely a thing at the time, especially on the Sega CD. It was like the laserdisc era of arcade games all over again (except with more CGI). So Loadstar was nothing revolutionary.

Rebel Assault came out in 1993, right between Sewer Shark and Loadstar, and it does a better job of filling the screen with its video than the earlier game. The video's a bit... blocky though. Loadstar's clearly more impressive visually, on both console and PC.

Those purple dots are my shield. I'm trying to get into the habit of turning it on when the enemy plasma bolts start flying, as the shield regenerates and my hull doesn't. At least, I don't think that it does.

So when enemies appear I need to remember to press 'up' for shield, shoot them all with the mouse, and then immediately tap 'up' again to let the shield recharge for a moment before the next wave appears.

Oh crap, I was so focused on the enemies that I missed my turn! It's fine, I've messed it up before. It just means that I need to wait for the next junction to get back on track.
 

I don't even know what the game wants me to do about mattresses on the track. It seems like it's an unavoidable hull damage penalty, even with the shields up.

Maybe I should've activated Pong Mode.

Sega CD

On the Sega CD version you can enter a cheat that lets you play Pong with Mort's head, using a bit of the HUD as a paddle.

It seems like you're pretty much invulnerable in this mode. Trouble is that it's hard to keep track of a ball and your turns at the same time, and if you let the smiley slip by you the game goes back to normal.

Oh crap, where did that thing swoop in from? I don't need a boss fight now, I'm only 2 minutes into the level!

Fortunately it didn't stick around, so now I only have to worry about the endless drones again. Man, I'm not sure I can handle having to be completely focused like this for another 6 minutes of intense shooting. It's going to feel more like 60 minutes!

Arcade games also demand this kind of heightened alertness that makes time slow down, but time flies when you're having fun, so I guess the two things cancel each other out a little. Trouble is, I'm not having any fun here.

Awesome, I've reached a cutscene! I don't know if that counts as a checkpoint, but it makes me feel like I'm getting somewhere at least.

That had better not be the Weyland Yutani logo on those boxes, I don't want the twist to be that I'm hauling deadly Xenomorph camels.

Oh hey, I'm on a collision course with another train. Joy.

It's times like this where you have a split second to make the right choice, and I reacted instantly... by activating shields and shooting at it. Obviously I should've turned left, but I needed five more milliseconds to notice that turning was an option and hit the button, and I didn't have them. So Tully's legend ends with his skin burning off, again.

At least now I get to see if that cutscene really was a checkpoint.
 

Oh, what? I have limited lives? So it doesn't matter how good I am at the shooting if I can't spot oncoming trucks in time, as it's three strikes and I'm out.

Wait, why am I getting frustrated about this? The game's given me an excuse to stop playing! I can just walk away and sit somewhere quiet for a bit. But I really should finish the first level at least and see what the next one is like before turning the game off.

That is a beautiful options screen, I'm genuinely impressed. Wait, the game only has three levels? That's not impressive at all! If they all have a 9 minute time limit you could finish the whole game in under half an hour.

Also, it turns out that I was playing on 'Easy' the whole time, which might explain why I wasn't taking much damage from enemies. There's no 'Normal' difficulty though so I'm just going to leave it alone.

There are other buttons here, like 'Tech Data', which shows off the game's 3D models. Plus there's a 'Previews' button! There's something you don't see in games anymore. I want to see some trailers.

Damn, why aren't I playing this? Probably because it's another video-based rail shooter with great visuals and terrible gameplay.

This is Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm, which throws away the brawler gameplay of the arcade classic for basic rail shooter gameplay that no one wanted. No seriously, the game bombed. All of Rocket Science's games bombed.

Even this amazing-looking World War I game called Wing Nuts that I had honestly never heard of until now.

I mean the video clips are amazing-looking (for their time), I don't mean the game itself looks amazing. You move a crosshair over stuff while a video plays, it's not really ticking all the boxes for me.

LATER, ON LEVEL 1

Good news, Mortimer let me know a maintenance bay was coming up, so I pulled in for a pit stop and got the Loadstar fixed up! I also got a cutscene where Tully makes Mortimer sad with his opinions about automatic repair drones. He mentions that he doesn't like AI "things" working on the Loadstar, so Mort asks if he talks about him like this as well. Tully replies that he doesn't talk about him at all.

It's nice to get a bit more live action, even if it does give me a horrifying glimpse into Mortimer's tragic existence. Building self-aware computers and then bolting them into space trucks is some Black Mirror shit.

It hasn't been entirely smooth sailing for me on my second run, but I am doing better than I did the first time. I'm using the shield a lot more and colliding with things less, so I eventually made it past the first cutscene checkpoint and into the next zone with one life left.

I've also gotten into the habit of holding the direction for the next turn way in advance, so when I get to the junction I don't have to think about it.

Shit, I accidentally got turned around at a junction and now I'm heading back into the previous zone! I didn't even know I could do that.

All my progress is getting undone... and I still have to shoot those damn enemies the whole time. I'm not against the idea of shooting enemies with the mouse, in fact it's the core gameplay of many of my favourite games, but this is really taking the fun out of it.

It should be easy enough to get back on track, I just have to keep taking junctions when they come up and then follow the arrow. But it's not a good feeling to be stuck in the middle of a maze of identical tunnels with no map.

Damn, that ship's back and this time it's sticking around for a proper boss fight.

There's no health bar or obvious weak points, so I suppose all I can do is keep shooting and hope that it's working. Maybe I can disable some of its weapons as well, I dunno. It'd be nice to take some of the pressure off my shields. Oh crap, I was supposed to make a right turn here! I got distracted.

The original Sega CD version doesn't have boss fights, they were added for the PC version, so... yay, I guess? Man I wish this game had autofire.

The boss exploded after just 2 and a half minutes of continual fire, so that's the first level completed! I am now a third of the way through the entire game.

Though hang on, I started that boss fight with less than 2 minutes left on the clock and I finished it with time left over, so what's going on there? Oh no, don't tell me that the timer runs at half speed, so a 9 minute level actually drags on for 18 minutes! No wonder it felt like everything was taking forever.

There wasn't much to show off at the end of level 1, Tully took his hat off and cheered, but I have this pretty 'insert disk' screen for you at least. Wait, shouldn't that be 'disc'? Also if your CD starts flashing like that, you should be worried.

Level two starts with another beautiful 3D sequence showing the Loadstar getting the cargo attached.

Wait, the ship already had cargo attached! I remember seeing the boxes in the cutscene when I crossed between zones. They didn't render alternative disc 1 versions of the cutscenes featuring an empty ship.

Tully's ready to head out, but when the bay door opens it reveals a whole lot of police ships waiting outside. Some ships even turn to face him, like they were chatting to their friend or something.

The funny thing is that they're not here to arrest him for all those cops he blew up in the previous stage. They've actually been staking out this bay waiting to see who picked up the highly illegal stolen camel cargo contained within.

So now Tully has two choices: give up and let his nemesis Ned Beatty take him in, or fly down the trackway like a maniac, shooting anyone he sees.

He goes with option #2 and Mortimer is mortified.

Sorry buddy, this is going to get much worse before it gets better. Tully was just one trip away from retirement as well (seriously).

TWO SECONDS LATER

Damn, those camels are dynamite!

Okay, in my defence I've never seen the track split down the middle like that and I've never been forced to make a choice on which direction to go. Usually the truck just carries on down the rail if I don't press anything.

The thing I don't get is: why is his costume flipped? All the logos are backwards.

I can probably replay this level as much as I like now that it's unlocked, plus I have lives left, but look at it. Am I really likely to get anything from this stage that I didn't get from the first level? Nah, I think I'm done here.


CONCLUSION

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Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine actually has a lot in common with the last game I wrote about, SNES platformer Donkey Kong Country. They were both developed for ageing 16-bit consoles in 1994, they were both sold on their awesome ray-traced 3D graphics rendered on SGI workstations, and they both had to sell a lot of copies to make a profit. Though one had more success with that than the other.

The big difference between Loadstar and Donkey Kong Country is one game is built around its system's strengths and the other its limitations. 16-bit consoles are great at moving sprites in front of parallax backgrounds, so DKC uses 3D art to enhance its sprite sheets and tilesets. On the other hand, the Sega CD only allows for the bare minimum of interaction while a video is playing and its owners typically bought action games, so Loadstar pretty much had to be all about moving a crosshair around the screen while stuff happened. Rocket Science had developed technology for playing (almost) full-screen video and switching scenes seamlessly, that was their greatest trick, but if you're making an action game the best that'll get you is something like Rebel Assault II. Successful FMV games like The 7th Guest, Myst, Wing Commander 3 and Command & Conquer either focused on thoughtful adventure gameplay or used the video as cutscene interludes between levels.

To be fair, rail shooters are one of the most traditional types of FMV games, they've been around forever, since the dawn of time itself. Or the dawn of LaserDisc at least. If this game had hit arcades in 1983 it would've been huge. FMV shooters like Sewer Shark, Rebel Assault and Microcosm also found some success in the early '90s, when people bought their first CD-ROM drives. But the novelty wore off fast, and people just weren't interested in Loadstar, or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, or Wing Nuts, or anything Rocket Science was selling. So players didn't really gave the game a fair chance, and few ever discovered for themselves just how dull and repetitive it is. I mean at least Rebel Assault goes to different places and mixes up the gameplay a little! Loadstar has its final boss fight in space and that's the only real change of scenery you get.

On the plus side, the live-action scenes are actually pretty decent considering the budget. They hired actual actors who put the effort in, put them on real sets, and gave them a script that's... well, it's the good kind of cheesy. Even Brian Moriarty does a good job as Mortimer. Don't get me wrong, it's still inferior in every department to an average episode of Red Dwarf, but it's not bad for an FMV game. That 8 minute Wing Commander-style intro really sets you up to expect an old-school interactive movie, the kind with three CDs of video. And that's exactly what I got.

Trouble is that 90% of the video is of driving down rails, that's where all the disc space went.

Here's what happens in the remaining 3 minutes of story: Tully sneaks into the police motor pool to get a cheeky refuel, he's harassed by one of the other truckers from the bar, then he launches into orbit, fights a boss (DOS version only), and the game ends with the Loadstar flying to Phobos. I mean holy shit. The story never could have never redeemed the game no matter how good it was, but it could have existed at least! You never see any of the people from the bar again, aside from Tully, the sheriff and a 10 second cameo by one of the other truckers. All those sets they built only appear in the opening cutscene and after that point all you get is a few brief moments in the Loadstar cockpit.

Plus everything introduced at the start, the space station orbiting Earth, the explosion on Charon, none of that is relevant to anything. The space station isn't even relevant to the scene that focuses on it and the explosion gets just one mention later in the bar at the start! There isn't even a twist with the camels, besides them being illegal, which is like 'duh!' Saying that Wing Commander 3 has about 10 times as much story content sounds bad, but Loadstar's main problem is that it wastes the time it has.
 
I was curious about how things went so horribly off track here, so I did a bit of research and found out that this is apparently exactly what they intended to make. They were going to produce a trilogy of these games, all based on a film script that designer Ron Cobb had written in the '70s, so everything at the start is set up for the real story that would've happened in the sequels. It would've been like a 40 minute TV movie split into three full-price episodes, each padded out by a hour of tedious rail-shooting. But Loadstar II: Showdown on Phobos never got made, so we'll never know what the explosion on Charon was about. Or care.

In the end, Loadstar is a story of a bunch of talented artists and programmers who assumed they could make a video game and burned through a lot of money creating something that appealed more to investors than it did to players. It's all a bit of a spectacular train wreck really.

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Next, on Super Adventures, I'm staying in the '90s a while longer but switching genre. See if you can identify the next game from that clue on the left, if you dare.

Or you could leave a comment about Loadstar if you want. Maybe you really liked the game and think that I'm wrong! I can be wrong sometimes.